My Trip to GNOME: a 3.10 Review

Remember back when GNOME and KDE dominated Linux desktops? Seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it? Yet it was only three years ago, in April 2011, that GNOME 3 was released. Its radically redesigned interface shook up everyone. Some eagerly adopted it. Others left GNOME.

In this brief review I take a fresh look at GNOME today, as it’s currently distributed in several popular Linux distributions.

My Trip to GNOME: A 3.10 Review

Whether or not you like the GNOME’s Version 3 desktop, there’s no denying that it hurt the product’s popularity. Big changes occurred back when it was released:

The new MATE interface forked from GNOME 2 to offer an updated version of the traditional GNOME 2 experience. MATE was well-received and is available in a dozen distros’ repositories.

Ubuntu dropped GNOME in favor of its new Unity desktop in their April 2011 release.

Linux Mint gained popularity with many who rejected GNOME 3 and Unity. Mint offers several desktops, but it’s best known for MATE, and for Cinnamon, another menuing desktop that also began as a GNOME fork.

GNOME 3 embarked upon a long journey to a menu-driven “compatibility desktop.” In March 2013, GNOME Version 3.8 unveiled Classic Mode, a full-featured GNOME-2 style interface built upon current software. You install it, then specify whether to use the GNOME 3 shell or Classic Mode when you log in.

Why?

GNOME 3 stumbled for several reasons. The design team decided to reinvent the user interface. They altered the basic ways in which users do their work. This is risky without lots of carefully planned user testingand feedback cycles.

The GNOME 3 user interface shows the influence of handheld designs. Like Windows 8 and Unity — UI’s designed to support both handhelds and laptops/desktops — GNOME 3 couldn’t easily reconcile the differences between the two device types. Consider how stark those differences are. Is the device “always on”? Is touch fundamental to using it, or altogether absent? Is the display huge or tiny? Are menus practical? How about windowing and workspaces? Can the user right-click? Can he swipe the screen? How does the desktop user make a “pressure gesture”?

Many GNOME 3 improvements over the past three years (such as Classic Mode), recognize that most personal computer users don’t want a mobile device interface. Perhaps someday they will, but not yet. It’s worth noting that both Apple and Google avoided the interface controversy that engulfed GNOME 3, Unity, and Windows 8. They offer distinct handheld and laptop/desktop operating systems. (Apple sells iOS for handhelds and its Mac OS for PC’s. Google supports Android on handhelds and Chrome OS for traditional computers.)

And Today?

I was one of the many who rejected GNOME 3 and Unity when they came out in 2011. Recall that, at that time, not only did these GUI’s abandon the proven menu interface, but neither had gone through the three years of intense improvement we’ve witnessed since.

I decided to give GNOME another try. What’s it like today? I evaluated the product from the viewpoint of a laptop or desktop user (not handhelds). The goal was to find out:

How quickly can one use GNOME 3 productively?

Is it suitable for neophytes? How about sophisticated users?

Is its workflow as productive as a traditional menu interface?

I tried GNOME 3 by way of three leading distros: openSUSE 13, Fedora 20, and Mageia 4. All support GNOME 3.10. Version 3.12 came out a couple months ago but hasn’t yet been adopted by most distros. You can read about its improvements here.

Learning GNOME 3

The desktop starts in the Activities Overview. The Overview is for launching new applications, switching windows, and moving windows between workspaces. Your desktop switches between the Activities Overview and the specific tasks you perform. Exit the Overview by selecting an app, window, or workspace.

The Activities Overview

The vertical dashboard or Dash on the left side of the screen lists your favorite and running applications. Single-click an icon to run its app.

It’s easy to add or remove apps to the Dash. Those who like to cover their desktops with quick-launch icons will appreciate this flexibility. To add a favorite, just start the program, and it appears in the Dash. Right-click its icon and select Add to Favorites. To delete a favorite, just right-click its icon and select Remove from Favorites.

To run an app not in your favorites, either find the program by thesearch bar at the top of the screen, or select the bottom icon in the favorites list (called Show Applications). The search bar is always in focus whenever you see it. No need to click the mouse cursor at it. Just start typing and your query appears. As you type, possible answers display immediately below.

Search only succeeds if you know the right keyword or characters with which to search. For example, what if you’re used to Windows and want to watch your computer’s performance? You might enter “task manager”. That won’t retrieve the Linux System Monitor. Nor will “performance manager” or “performance monitor”(*). “System” or “monitor” or some starting substring of these two keywords is what you need to enter. The search box is not intelligent like a Google or Bing search.

The search bar can also find contacts, documents, files, notes, and passwords. You can enable or disable each searchable category at will. A single click sends your search to the Internet.

If you click on the Show Applicationsicon, icons for all installed apps cover your desktop. You may have to page a few times to view them all. What you see varies by what you have installed. In the three distros I tested, beyond simple alphabetization, there didn’t appear to be any organizing principle. Applications were mixed right in with tools and folders. (In openSUSE, 17 utilities were collected under a Utilities folder, but 16 games were individually strewn across the Show Applications display. Go figure.)

Show Applications

Here’s the good news. If the Show Applications view isn’t well organized, it hardly matters. The GNOME 3 desktop runs at in-memory speeds. An extra click or two won’t slow you down. Paging the apps is incredibly fast. Or, just type a keyword into the search bar. Once you know what search strings to use, you’ll get instant gratification.

Workspaces are useful in managing a cluttered desktop. They allow you to group windows together. GNOME 3 makes it quick and simple to use them. Just access the Workspace Switcher at the right side of the Activities Overview screen. You can drag windows from the Activities Overview to the Workspace Switcher to create new workspaces or to add to existing ones. To focus on a workspace, just click on it.

Viewing One of Two Workspaces

Let’s wrap up this micro-tour by mentioning three underlying principles to GNOME 3. First, the interface is fast. If ever you have to make an extra mouse click or two, or page your apps in Show Applications, it doesn’t matter. And this was on my seven-year-old test boxes, early dual-core computers that each have only 2GB of memory and 256MB of video memory!

The interface contains dozens of shortcuts. For example, the Super key — down in the left hand side of your keyboard, with the Windows logo on it — switches you between the Activities Overview and your tasks. Tap that key and you instantly toggle in and out of the Overview. You can do the same by moving your mouse cursor over the invisible hot spot in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Toggle between apps by hitting Alt+Tab. Double-click on an app’s title bar to toggle whether its window is maximized. Click on your user id to expose the hidden Logoff button.

You get the idea. To become productive with GNOME 3, you master its many simple timesavers. Familiarity counts with this interface.

Shortcuts make GNOME 3 incredibly powerful, and quick and easy to use. But they are not intuitive. This interface is easy for veterans to use but may not be for neophytes. The same may be said of GNOME’s quest for simplicity and its “less is more” philosophy. GNOME’s few widgets and clean lines provide a simple look but may not be so simple for beginners to figure out. A couple hours of formal training solves this. Or, just spend a day or two exploring the product and you’ll become quite proficient with it.

GNOME 3.10 has become one of the most customizable Linux desktops, with its dozens of interface extensions. For example, the GNOME Tweak Tool puts many desktop behaviors under your control, including maximize and minimize buttons. You can even add a rollover menu to the top panel if you miss GNOME 2! The Tweak Tool is bundled in 3.10 and you can toggle all its features — like the applications menu — on or off. See this website for many other extensions.

The Applications Menu Provided by the GNOME Tweak Tool

The Bottom Line

GNOME 3 has come a long way since its introduction. Release 3.10 came out in September 2013, representing three years of solid work on version 3. The effort shows. It’s obvious that much thought has gone into the small tweaks that distinguish this responsive desktop.

Whether you’ll like GNOME 3 depends on whether you capitalize on its workflow paradigm. Though it initially puts some people off, the bimodal Activities Overview / Specific Task model empowers others.

Another factor is whether you’ll take the time required to familiarize yourself with GNOME’s many hidden features. Often, those who succeed with GNOME enjoy exploring their desktop and learning new techniques, while those who reject it don’t like spending time learning what they see as the “tricks” of a new interface. GNOME’s shortcuts underlie its effectiveness. Combined with the in-memory speeds at which the interface responds, they’ll make you a power user. You’ll probably want to customize your desktop by extensions, too.

Who should use GNOME 3? The product pleases those who use their computer daily — office professionals, administrators, frequent users, managers, computer professionals, and hobbyists. They’ll leverage the workflow model, enter the first few letters of applications into the search bar, and enjoy the powerful timesavers.

Unsophisticated end users will adapt more quickly to a traditional menu-driven interface. (Of course, just a few mouse clicks adds a menu to the desktop via the GNOME Tweak Tool.) Those who infrequently use their computers might not remember GNOME’s hidden power features. And some will feel that the bimodal interface simply doesn’t fit their work habits or how they use their computer.

For myself, I didn’t find a compelling reason to switch my current systems to GNOME 3.10. Yet I enjoyed working with it. This desktop helps you be highly productive once you become proficient. If I were to contract tomorrow at a firm where using the GNOME 3 shell was required, I’d look forward to it.

To see GNOME 3.10 in action, watch the Youtube reviews here and here. This article summarizes all 3.10’s new features.

—————————— Howard Fosdick is a database and systems administrator who works as an independent consultant. He frequently writes technical articles and has an M.S. in Computer Science.

*Under openSUSE 13, you won’t find the System Monitor by entering “performance manager” or “performance monitor” into the search bar. However, if you enter the single letter “p” — and no more — you will locate the System Monitor.

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30 Comments

Gnome 3.10 is the second release where you start to see the new gnome vision coalesce into something tangible.

The latest 3.12 release is an all round improvement with increased polish.

Unfortunately, 3.12 is a release that will probably be ignored due to distro timings, but 3.14 so far is increasing the coherence, so by the time the next releases of distros start being released, quite a few people may be surprised at how slick and usable Gnome has become.

The old Red Hat 6 of fourteen years ago came with the Enlightenment window manager which implemented edge-flip, and even though it drives you batty at first, in the end I came to depend on it to manage windows in a large virtual display. No “workplace-switcher” to slow you down. Unfortunately that feature has disappeared from a default install of Gnome, and getting it back has become increasingly difficult. Gnome 3 and Unity make it basically unusable, so every machine I run has Gnome 2 in some form or other.

The old Red Hat 6 of fourteen years ago came with the Enlightenment window manager which implemented edge-flip, and even though it drives you batty at first, in the end I came to depend on it to manage windows in a large virtual display. No “workplace-switcher” to slow you down.

I am curious about that edge-flip, could you show an image or a video? The “workspace-switcher” is dynamic by default rather than a static four workspaces.

Gnome Shell is very usable once the users drop the mindset about the legacy Gnome 2. For you information, Gnome Classic session reproduce the layout of the old Gnome 2 (enabled by default on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7).

If the e16 edge flip he’s referring to is the same as e17 edge flip, the idea is that you can scroll workspaces by moving the mouse past the edge of the screen to the left or right. I never particularly liked that feature, but to each his own.

I’ve been using Gnome Shell right from the first release and I’ve been finding out that some design decisions that looked weird at first are not as stupid as I thought.

One of the many strange decisions is removing window buttons, which can be solved through gnome-tweak. That’s what I’ve been doing all this time, yet I’ve been finding that I’m not actually minimizing windows anymore even though I can.

The mix of overview + multiple desktops + middle click to send windows to the back (+ other somewhat standard features of linux desktops like alt+drag to move or resize, and being able to scroll on non-foreground windows) completely removes the need of minimizing for me.

Then there’s the overview. This is probably what annoyed me the most, taking me out of the desktop just to open an application.

It’s still somewhat annoying, but since you are taken to a decent implementation of OSX’s “exposÃ¨” rather that straight to an app grid, the switch of context is not as abrupt as it’d be in Windows8.

There’ve also been some nice improvements under the hood, like multimonitor support. I remember having to do a presentation with one of the first Gnome Shell releases and finding I was stuck with the classical problem of different aspect ratios. Plug a 4:3 projector and your laptop screen goes squared.

I don’t know when this was fixed exactly, but as of 3.12 you can plug any second monitor and both displays will instantly work fullscreen with native aspect ratio. Not even a flicker, and the screen configuration app works great for adjusting the relative possition of all your screens.

It still has a fair way to go. I’ve had problems with some screen recording apps that would cause a restart of the window manager (which happens fast, not very ofter and nothing really breaks, but happens and the screen recording fails).

I’m also not digging the notification area at the bottom, it feels like some forgotten limbo where things that could-be-indicators-but-are-not are thrown, like some quirky workaround that at some point had been elevated to the “feature” status.

And they are thrown in there just along with actual notifications, to make things even more confusing.

All in all I can’t really say that I like it all that much because it still annoys me at times, but I find it really useable and potentially likeable, which is saying a lot considering that back on the 3.0 release I thought that the Gnome devs had just gone nuts.

I even considered going to KDE, which I used a lot before the 4.0 release, but after all these years using GTK apps the Qt widgets feel very very alien.

*I forgot to mention one thing that, while apparently insignificant, has broken my workflow more that any of the other changes from Gnome2: the desktops are now arranged vertically.

Ok, that might sound stupid, but bear with me ;D In Gnome2 I had the super+z and super+x to move between horizontal desktops, and ctrl+super+z and ctrl+super+x to do so while also carrying the focused window to the new desktop. That made “sense” because a)I could do that with one single hand instead of the default “ctrl+alt+cursors”, and b)the x and z keys are also horizontal on the keyboard.

So, ok, I already said that it might sound stupid (and maybe it is) but super+a is already assigned to the app view in the overview (and I use that, not often but sometimes), so I have no comfortable unassigned combinations to replicate my previous set up making “spatial” sense in relation to the desktops’ placement.

I think Gnome will become popular again due to its surface similarity to Android. Handhelds will outnumber desktops & laptops and people will expect a similar interface across devices. Windows 8? Maybe not. But Gnome 3 and Unity, absolutely.

few months back i gave gnome shell another chance and overall my experience was that it was not bad …. the desktop is quiet customizable and has more features then other gnome shells like ubuntu unity and cinnamon ….. only annoyance for me was maximize button and minimize buttons and one click solution to switch applications as i don’t like to click activities and then switch applications …. both were solved one through tweak tools and other from installing plank dock and since then i am using it as my main desktop

1. All of this is valid for GNOME 3.2. Frankly, the changes to GNOME Shell since 3.2 are mostly neither user-visible nor substantial enough to be worth mention. (“Classic” mode is probably an exception, though I never used it, so I don’t know whether it is different enough from preceding “Fallback” mode).

2. The only feature I was missing in default GNOME3 setup was minimizing. In fact I abandoned transmission-gtk and rhythmbox simply because of this “feature”. Note, that with new style applications (Maps, Totem, Web, etc) adding “minimize” button really screws the experience.

3. I am a bit concerned with new style applications actually, because they make experience inconsistent â€“ they make third-party applications (like GIMP) feel alien, while IMO the only value in DE is consistency.

4. The fact that GNOME Shell is built on top of Mozilla’s JS engine is driving me nuts. Given that GNOME uses webkit elsewhere (including Web, default browser), full GNOME installation depends on 2 separate JS engines, which is ridiculous.

5. Actually, I don’t understand the rationale for using JS for desktop applications. The rationale for its use in web browsers was already questionable, and reopening this can of worms once again feels foolish.

6. Otherwise GNOME3 is fine for me. I actually think it is improvement over GNOME2, unlike Mate and that Mint thing I always forget the name of.

Linux desktop will never happen until the rift between Qt and GTK applications is closed. I wouldn’t be sad to see GTK go, but even if it never did, all applications should run and integrate with your desktop whatever that desktop is. It is ridiculous how choosing a desktop in Linux means choosing a set of apps, and apps from another look ugly and integrate badly if they run at all.

After all, a nice desktop is nice, but it is the applications that make the difference. I should be able to run a years old desktop, yet still run my choice of apps, not worrying about the desktop, much less about the toolkit.

Maybe not “unbearable” ugliness, but bothersome nonetheless. And then Kate is absent from your Gnome menu, and Gedit or Transmission are missing from yor KDE menu, and when you manage to bring them up in the rival desktop they ignore your font settings, or printing settings, or they bring up the wrong console, or do not find the media player.

It is far from a seamless and pleasant experience.

I like the Gnome desktop far better than KDE, although I don’t like how it has been dumbed down over the years. But I Qt apps are easier to develop and maintain, and in any case I would like to *seamlessly* run any app I liked in whatever desktop I chose, without even having to know what a gui toolkit is.

Possibly, uniting the Qt and the GTK world is one of the things Ubuntu Unity pretends. But oh, do I hate the Unity launcher!

all applications should run and integrate with your desktop whatever that desktop is.

It would lead to the OSX-like desktop where you can’t configure much. If that is what you want, quit whinning and go to OSX. Really.

I should be able to run a years old desktop, yet still run my choice of apps, not worrying about the desktop, much less about the toolkit.

This requires a lot of effort, limits developers in many ways and screws the ability to implement new features within reasonable timeframes. And all of these just in order to satisfy one’s baby ducksyndrome? Huh…

Why should I go Mac? I have a perfectly serviceable PC that cost me a fraction of the money. And I hate iTunes and iDependency in general. Though Garage Band and iMovies are spectacularly good. And Linux Desktop is good, if not perfect: I just want it to be more perfect!

Development would be more agile with more developers, more users and a more appropriate development kit. Cantonization helps none of this. This is not fragmentation, it is disintegration along a myriad fracture lines, by distro, by release, by desktop, by toolkit… All this variety and inconvenience for a relatively small pool of development resources.

Look at Android to see how a Linux “desktop” can progress and evolve while maintaining compatibility, and how it gains thousands of contributors with its nice development kits and detailed, easy to find documentation. To acquire any sort of critical mass, unification is key.

You are being egoistic: what you see as improvement is damaging many other people, and you don’t want to deal with it. The “cantonization” you are talking about is the only reason why people who are willing to trade some of their time for future effectiveness can end up using consistent desktop that would behave as they want.

GNOME, KDE, XFCE, suckless and many other projects build software pieces that are consistent with each other and inconsistent with everything else not because all these people are lazy and ignorant, but because they follow different (sometimes even opposite) values. Implementing your suggestion would deprive people sharing these values of enjoying software that matches their preferences.

I guess I am, I would like things to be the way I like 🙂 Oh, I deal with it, and I am thankful to developers, far from my intentions to denigrate their job. I just wish there were more integration, and still think the Linux Desktop would fare better if there were.

OK, Gnome 1 — I startet with 1.4 — and Gnome 2 were pretty much desktops in the line of Motif, CDE. Also very similar to Windows 95 and successors.

Gnome 3 is a completely different beast. The first two weeks of using it, I hated it. Yes, I hated my now absolute favorite desktop. But I believed — more exact I somehow felt — it’s a layer 8 problem. So I investigated further and further. And I week later I started to appreciate Gnome 3. Another week later I started to like it. Now it is my favorite desktop.

So what was my problem with Gnome 3. Simply Gnome 3 is different. Gnome 3 is more like a work bench with a cupboard attached like I desktop. The objects are not visible all the time. You have to open the cupboard to see them. As a result using Gnome 3 I have a clean workbench instead of a cluttered desktop.

now, if i only found one working extension for 3.12 that hides atrocity called AppMenu in top bar which never worked as it should… gnome wouldn’t even be bad if i discount how much worse games perform when i run gnome-shell as window manager.

For me Gnome 3 — much like OSX and Windows 8, is just part of this increasing middle-finger on the part of “designers” to people who actually use desktop computers as… well… desktop computers.

Admittedly, I’ve never used a *nix WM that didn’t feel like pathetic crippleware — complex tasks simplified down to where you can’t even perform them anymore, and the simplest of tasks that should take half a second requiring hours of Googling and dicking around on the command line to accomplish. That Gnome 3 only further dumbed down or outright removed basic functionality I have come to expect any good desktop system to have as of ~1998.

I could actually see grandma getting by ok on it, much like OSX — but as someone who actually uses something other than the web browser and media players, Linux, OSX, and now Windows 8 feel like the developers are telling ‘power users’ to go plow themselves — and it’s not just OS; see the near useless state of current browsers dumbing down the UI to the worst of IE 3 Mac — particularly the pathetic crippleware that is ChrOpera compared to REAL Opera (12).

Much of it seems to be this attitude that if less than 80% of users use a function, nobody needs it… but worse, it just seems like most of this isn’t about functionality or usability, and is instead the same thing destroying website functionality: Taking graphic artists and stroking their… ego… Yeah, ego. that’s the word I want to use.

The artsy fartsy bull, from the pointless animated rubbish to the goofy icons that leave you with no idea what anything does, to the massive whitespace around things to the point you are lucky if you can fit a dozen IM contacts on the screen at the same time — all just makes things harder to use, no matter how “pretty” it is.

Form over functionality is ruining just about everything right now — and that anyone out there is dumb enough to praise it, much less throw money or manpower at it is mind-blowing. Do we need to buy bibs for the drooling morons who’ve ended up in charge of these things?

But what do I know? I consider Apple products to have all the art and style of a recently sanitized hospital ward, and Windows 98 to be the pinnacle of OS UI design.(once you turn off some of the annoying crap like ‘channels’ and drag the taskbar where it belongs — to the SIDE of the screen, and turn off idiocy like “group by program”)

Of course, that other than LFN support, to me *nix desktops still haven’t caught up to Windows 3.0 or OS/2 1.3 in terms of actual usefulness / functionality doesn’t help.

I recently used GNOME 3.12 on a MacBook for a few weeks, and after a few appearance tweaks (smaller fonts, an “elegance” theme), it all looked good and worked well. The apps, in particular, with their unified titlebars/toolbars, were professional and polished.

I eventually gave up on it, though, because for me Shell was using about 500 megabytes of memory just to sit in the background, and it was generally slow, paging memory, to bring up just to launch an app.

Mine isn’t a new computer, and more RAM would probably help. Still, for me it was a lot more sluggish than OS X. In the end, Shell is just a launcher and switcher, and didn’t seem worth the resources, or really any great focus in the desktop at all.

(I’m quite happy with Openbox/Tint2/Pcmanfm for now. I mostly use Scribus, OpenOffice apps and some programming tools.)

As a more general note, in some way the extra layer of GNOME felt too far removed and independent from the rest of the system too. It’d be fine if I stay only within GNOME, but e.g. booting and drivers weren’t covered (I don’t think) in the System Settings, and I haven’t got around to quite understanding where gconf/dconf fit in once you aren’t using GNOME exclusively. This isn’t GNOME’s fault, at all really, but to me it was somewhat like whiplash: either do everything in the cocoon of GNOME or fall back to vi. And once you weren’t in the GNOME environment, it was hard to tell how to make apps work together. Off the top of my head, I think I could make use of a GUI browser of system settings, just all the files in /etc and .config and wherever else settings are kept.